Time to sneak in a blog post while we are still in June. I’ve been playing and socializing a lot this month, which is why I haven’t gotten round to updating my blog. I’ve been having a lot of fun meeting new people and experiencing new things, even though this has lead me to frequently working off of five hours of sleep. This is not ideal as it increases volatility in my results and also decreases overall efficiency, but it’s still better than not working at all and I believe it is simply something that you have to accept if you want to maintain an active social life, at least when that involves night life activities.

It seems that the main places for going out here in Lisbon, at least as far as bars are concerned, are Bairro Alto and Bica, which is where I’ve been primarily going out with the new friends I’ve made here. I believe the main clubs are called Cais and Lux, which I have yet to visit, but are definetly on my to-do list. I’m not a big club guy, but can appreciate a nice venue.

I’ve been squeezing in the occasional sightseeing trip, when I have had time, and have recently picked up a copy of Timeout magazine’s guide for Lisbon, which I think is really good for restaurants and current events in particular, but also has some interesting sightseeing tips.

There are a lot of festivals and festivities during the Summer months here. I recently had the pleasure of visiting Lisbon’s Sardine Festival, which is more formally called The Feast of St Anthony. Essentially it’s one massive street festival with a parade on one of the days on Avenida da Liberdade, where a lot of grilled food is eaten with bread. It’s primarily sardines and bread, but they also have bifanas, entreadas and churros (pork, pork and doughnut-like pastry).

The festivities lasted for three days and were a lot of fun. I would definetly recommend them to anybody coming out around June 12th-14th which is when they are at.

Woman Grilling in Alfama

Sardine Festival in Alfama

Alfama rooftops during Sardine Festival

I also had the opportunity to watch Portugal play Russia in a qualifier for the World Cup of football in Brasil next year. I feel as though I got a relatively good deal on some tickets, considering how late I bought them. I’m also pretty sure I sat close to the legendary Eusebio.

Russia Portugal Match

Right now, I believe the next thing on the agenda are Summer music festivals. I’ve heard particularly good things about Optimus Alive which I actually intended to visit last year as part of a sort of scouting trip to Lisbon, but ended up not being able to make it due to a trip with friends to Italy. I might look into it or otherwise just keep an open eye and keep on flicking through my Timeout to see if anything sparks my interest.

I feel like I have a good balance going right now between work, socializing and health and hope to continue to work on all three of these areas. Poker has been good so far, but not great. I hit a bit of rough patch shortly after the Sardine festival, but still wanted to keep playing due to promotions that were running at the time. This was slightly stressful for some time, but I think it was just due to a leak in my mindset that had resulted from running above expectation for some time and deviating from my core mindset that got me there in the first place. I’ve since then corrected these flaws and have returned to a more stable, less results-oriented way of thinking which I believe leads to more happiness overall.

I’ll try and keep these blog posts coming whenever I feel as though I have enough interesting things to write about. I also have some non-travel/day-to-day life related things that I want to blog about, but had sort of put to the side due to time constraints and wanting to blog more about current events.

I’ll leave you with some miscellaneous pictures from Portugal that did not make it into the main part of the post, but I would still like to share. All the best.